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“Yesterday, in discussing Kevin Fowler’s song Pound Sign, there was some debate about the origin of the term “pound sign” for the symbol #. I suggested that it all started with the substitution of # for £ on American typewriter keyboards, but others argued that # was a standard symbol for pound(s) avoirdupois. I’ve heard this theory before, but I expressed skepticism about it because I’ve never actually seen the symbol used that way.
Today, after some further research, I’m still not completely sure. But I’ve found a new theory, which I think has a better chance to be correct: it’s all Emile Baudot’s fault.”
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“Abd el-Kader was one of those men who, in Shakespeare’s words, had greatness thrust upon him. He certainly was not born into it. He was born in a remote region of the Turkish province of what we now call Algeria, in 1808, to a tribal family living on the edges of the Sahara desert. You would be hard pressed to find a region on Earth from which one of the century’s most influential men would be less likely to emerge.”
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The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense. Gets extra bonus points for grouping elements with similar properties, not just writing down a bunch of stuff in a Periodic-Table-like array.
7 thoughts on “Links for 2010-07-19”
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What about Ccd, climate change denialism? It probably belongs in column 18. On second thoughts, Christopher Monckton is a whole Dole Food Company of loopy frootness all by himself, so column 1 it is.
That periodic table was quite well done. If you look carefully, you can even see a few jokes slipped in (e.g., New World Order or Miracles).
Alan: “What about Ccd, climate change denialism?”
Climate change denialism is sheer idiocy, but hardly anyone is denying climate is changing, it’s always changing.
Anthropogenic global warming OTOH is no more then a plausible hypothesis and here skepticism is more then justified.
From scientific point of view the hypothesis that man-made emissions significantly impact global climate can only be tested by modeling global climate with and without those emissions and comparing obtained results. Unfortunately that requires reliable global climate models which are simply not available. So far not a single climate model has been proven to be reliable in predicting global climate on the timescale of decades: not a single climate model managed to correctly postdict the climate of the past century, not a single climate model managed to predict almost zero warming in the last decade.
Without satisfactory global climate models science cannot decide the issue.
It is important to remember that science is not magic, scientists are not infallible, the impressive power of science in deciding what is or isn’t true derives solely from scientific method which in turn relies on experiments.
The reliability of any scientific field is directly proportional to the ease of performing and interpreting experiments in that field. This is why fields like classical physics, chemistry and biology are much more reliable then fields like psychology, sociology or economy.
Unfortunately in climate science experiments are very hard to perform and interpret making climatology one of the least reliable scientific disciplines, the fact that it is also very young only compounds this problem.
All this means that climate science deserves a fair dose of skepticism in general, but in the case of AGW when you add clear conflicts of interests, politicization, stifling of dissent and withholding or destroying of scientific data it’s really hard to justify any other stance then skepticism.
Paul, other blogs (both within SB and elsewhere) cover the question better, but I will say this: If you don’t want to come off as precisely the sort of denialist that Alan is complaining about, you need to (1) provide links (2) to charges that have not been thoroughly discredited. Multiple investigative panels have found that the charges leveled in the so-called Climategate accusations were essentially manufactured from quotes taken out of context. And before you scream “whitewash,” let me clue you into some facts of research life: Penn State has a medical school, which gets vastly more research funding than the Atmospheric Sciences department, and all of that funding would be at risk if they knowingly continued to employ a data faker. So PSU had every reason to throw Mann under the bus if he were guilty of misconduct, but they found he wasn’t.
Eric I did not say anyone faked the data.
As for withholding data here is a link confirming East Anglia scientists broke FOI laws by refusing the requests. The only reason they weren’t persecuted is because the complaint was made too late:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7004936.ece
As for destroying the data, they admitted themselves they deleted much of the raw data making independent verification of their temperature records impossible:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece
As for conflicts of interest climate funding greatly increased since AGW became popular, politicization is obvious and stifling of dissent is also plainly visible, both in climate gate emails and in public communications (particularly before climate gate).
Anyway the climategate is not particularly important for my argument, I only mentioned it as an additional issue casting doubts on the reliability of climate science.
Paul
Please see
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/global_warming/leakegate/
and
http://www.stthomas.edu/engineering/jpabraham/
I did check those links but cannot see how they are relevant to what I said.